[Atrix 4G General] MyronJ906:
You can't have your battery and eat it to!

I always feel like I have to drop into these threads once I make some new personal discovery. The one I made yesterday was obvious, but I think I might not be the only one who failed to realize *how much* of a difference this could make.

The biggest change to effect my battery life: I stopped overclocking. I am now running Faux 0.2.0 stock enhanced (1.0 GHz) kernel. In my case, with my high-moderate use. My battery life went way up.

Before I changed to Faux's latest enhanced stock kernel, I always stayed with his latest and greatest version. First 1.1 GHz, then 1.3 but the difference in battery is far greater than I expected. There wasn't a jump between 1.1 GHz and 1.3 GHz from what I could tell, but 1.0 GHz was angelic. I would say I'm getting at least 6-8 more hours with pretty much the same use. If I hadn't started playing ferociously with Tasker (just messing around) I would have gotten even more battery life. Hell, I even would have been able to pull through to the next day.

Here's what happened: Fell asleep with the phone off the charger a couple nights ago. Which is convenient because it was the day I installed the stock kernel anyway. I was probably around 85-90% when that happened. I woke up, went to class and proceeded with my normal use. (Periods of inactivity, using it to send some texts, random tinkering, using it to websurf, and then eventually using it just to use it. It's my normal procedure). Then I checked battery stats throughout the day and voila. By almost 11:00 the next night, it was still going with a little battery.

I didn't let it completely die, decided to stick it on the charger then. In case I passed out and forgot to charge it.

Do you lose some power by overclocking? Yeah. But with the battery life in crease, you hardly even notice. In my opinion, the differences are negligible when you factor in the overall life of the phone. I don't play games, but I do mess with things *a lot*.

The other thing you will notice is that it's easier to underclock without taking a noticeable speed decrease on the 1.0 GHz kernel. I think the reason is that the frequencies are closer together (and underclocking actually works) so you don't notice a steep jump between say...1.3 GHz to 8whatever or 9whatever MHz. (I use some profiles to extend my battery just a little bit more once it gets low. Just in case I *am* out and can't get to a charger. The speed decrease will discourage me from messing with it at that point too so it becomes more of an emergency thing.

Man, every time I post it's like writing a novel. (When it's time for leaving, I hope you'll understand. I was born a rambling man!)

Point is, if you are on CM7, there are a decent number of optimizations as is. That alone runs much faster than stock GB in my experience. So the overclock is not necessary to get good performance).

Once again, you can't have your battery and eat it too! If you're a power (time wise) user like myself, you need to ditch the overclocking performance to see good battery time. If you're not using it much, you can afford the overclock. But then again, if you're not using the phone much then why do you need it?